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Walter Shapiro

Why Obama is surely facing a second term riddled with scandal and upheaval

But the re-elected president should be worrying about something else as well: the Second-Term Curse.

Dating back to Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 failure to bring the United States into the League of Nations, second presidential terms have almost always been disappointing and sad. There have been successes: Ronald Reagan passing tax reform in 1986 and Bill Clinton balancing the budget. But far more common are thwarted ambitions, scandal and a slow slide towards political irrelevance.

“This time it’s different” would be the likely response from Obama’s true believers. And these acolytes could be correct since historical patterns are merely suggestive rather than Marxist Iron Laws. But still it is likely that sometime before Moving Van Day in 2017, Obama will be embarrassed by at least one of these four factors:

Blowback

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Right, because everybody in America knows about Fast and Furious and the hundreds of people killed by Obama’s DoJ. And that he’s trying to hide it with executive privilege. And that American border agents were killed.

He’s already had at least one scandal that would have brought down a GOP president, a big enough one that an honorable man would have at least not run again, if not resigned.

What makes you think that anything short of shutting down the media will make them actually stand up to this guy?

This president is never, ever, ever going to be held to account for a single scandal or misstep. Never. It is not going to happen. Get over imagining that. He can, quite literally, do anything he wants and he will only be lauded for it. Imagining anything else is insane, and pathetic. We have a king, and the king can do no wrong. Get used to it.

I’m sure it has. Conservatives love to cite the “lame-stream media” or liberal pundits when they’re writing something that’s bad for Democrats. The “Media” is fully reliable when it reports on news that Republicans want to hear (like a falling stock market or bad employment numbers).

Alpha_Male on November 12, 2012 at 1:52 PM

You have a funny name. I don’t know about anyone else, but I do not consider the media reliable even when reporting supposedly objective things like employment numbers or illegals deported or number of people on food stamps. As for the stock market or other numbers that aren’t easily fudged and spun, I would think that would be the very least we should be expecting from “news” organizations.